Archive for the ‘Drunken Bunny’ Category

There won’t be any new posts at this address. I have, for a 2nd time, run out of allotted storage for the Endless British Pub Crawl Project. If you go to the start page of the original Endless British Pub Crawl, you’ll find an apt explanation of what happened to this one (the Endless British Pub Crawl Continues), as well. Don’t worry… the drunkenbunny version of the blog has gone upstate to chase rabbits on the farm we sent 1pumplane to stay.

This continuation, which ends with this post, covered 5 January 2015 until today, 07 October 2018. In addition to the other nonsense, you can find write-ups for pubs #1293 – 2175.

Another blog with another name is next and will cover all the same nonsense as the first two and still will be there to entertain me more than my audience; most of you lot are not even a consideration.

If you came for the pub write-ups (you sad bastard), it is probably easier to find one you are interested in on the map (linked here). It covers all three iterations (so far) of the blog.

There were too many strangers reading this diary and I felt that it wasn’t healthy behaviour for them. I needed to take some responsibility…this really shouldn’t be interesting material to the intended audience (people I actually know AND like, so not very many out there) which is now outnumbered by about 2500:1 (see the traffic plot for the last month or so, above).

So, the three versions* of the EBPC have been made private with access requiring a WordPress account and my revocable permission (in that order).

The blogs are still viewable by pre-privacy subscribers but a review of these will commence to thin the herd of SpamBots, unrelated businesses, and generally incompatible subscribers.

*1pumplane which covered the period from UK arrival to January 2015,
drunkenbunny — this blog — covering thereafter until I run out of storage allocation in a few weeks, and the EBPC3 which is ready to pick up from there.

Everyone does an End-Of-The-Year retrospective and I almost always do, too (here’s 2016’s review, for example). Remember, this blog is about pubs and running more than anything else and most of what remains is primarily adolescent humour. With that caveat, I bring you the Year 2017 In Review:

The Running Year 2017 (painfully detailed post to follow) was only salvaged in the last 1/3 of the year despite an initially strong start. I started training for the Siracusa Marathon which had been cancelled at the last moment in 2016 and which was again cancelled this year nearly 3 months before it was scheduled to run. Shit. However, this left me in pretty good shape for tackling the London Outer Orbital Path mostly in May (while Jackie was Stateside), averaging more than 6½ miles per day and one week over 90 miles.

But, a prolonged respiratory infection hit me the first week of June (lingering for another week and with a relapse mid-July) and a spot of cancer related depression thereafter pushed my weekly mileage down significantly. I had only managed to hit 1000 miles for the year by mid-August.

Fortuitously, I came into possession of a block of hash and a few very oily buds of home grown pot and, with their help and guidance, rediscovered the joys of hard training with no specific goal. Well, one specific goal: I decided to try to salvage the annual mileage with a modest 1600 by year’s end, upping that to 1800 as it became clear 1600 was going to fall easily, eventually ending on 2022. Now, if I hadn’t already blown through the weed I might target some real mileage for 2018.

Note: Project now completed. See the final post for a synopsis or the links, below, for individual lines.

There was this kid I corresponded with a couple of years back that was systematically hitting the London Underground stations in date order of their opening, having a pint in a nearby pub, then describing the architecture and history of both. I was jealous of him both for having the opportunity and the imagination not to mention he’s a much better writer). You can find these and an abortive subsequent project in his blog, INNSide Track.

I have been trying to figure out how to structure my next themed runs since finishing the LOOP and the A to Z runs, respectively, in May and September. I think I’ve found my quarry in a variation on the INNSide Track theme: run to every station on the TFL system. It is impractical, in this blog, to have a pint near every station not so much for the volume (my hollow legs have been well documented) but because I have already logged so many of the potential pubs — especially in the western and northwestern parts of the system. There will be drinking, of course, but there may be whole sections of quite a few miles without pubs that haven’t already featured here in “DRUNKENBUNNY” or in the earlier “1PUMPLANE” incarnation.

Runs must stop at each station in sequence, so overlap may result in redundant visits. For instance, if I want to get to Finchley Road from Harrow-on-the-Hill but have already done Wembley Park on the Jubilee Line, a second stop there would be required. However, Harrow-on-the-Hill to Uxbridge does the Metropolitan Line for that potential full run as well as the Piccadilly Line from Rayners Lane to Uxbridge, all in one trip.

The final limits are these have to be tube, rail, or tram stations (bus routes would be madness). These will include all Underground, Overground, and DLR; Trams are fairly close to buses, but I will strive to do these despite the dearth of “stations” to tick off. No timetable for completion, but as I am hoping to move to The North or The Midlands in the next year or two there is some sense of urgency. Wish me luck.

There were four recipes for Dandelion Wine in my copy of the Farmer’s Weekly Home Made Country Wines, Beer, Mead, & Metheglin (c 1955) and I took what I thought to be the best bits of numbers 3 & 4 with some small variations based on the supplies available on the day. The basic recipe was:

The early Spring, this year, brought a horde (or should that be ‘hoard’) of dandelions around the neighbourhood and it only took about twenty minutes (including a brief chat with an elderly neighbour about her friend who collects these for her tortoise: “do YOU have a tortoise?”) to gather a large bowl of flowers.

For the sugar, I bought a kg of demerara and topped it up with 380 g brewer’s sugars and 120 g of dark brown muscovado (1.5 kg or 3.3 pounds).

All those ingredients went into a stainless steel pot (there was still a bit of the green parts of the heads on the flower but I think the final product might taste good a little bitter) and brought to a boil, left to bubble for an hour, then cool for the next 4 hours. This wort was strained onto the juice of the lemon and orange, a teaspoon of yeast nutrients, and 2 crushed Campden tablets then left till the following afternoon.

The two recipes I was using were especially compelling because they used baker’s yeast for the fermentation. When I got home from a post-work run the next day, I poured a cup of the wort over 3/4 ounce (21 g) of bread yeast and let it get a start before shaking the bottle well and pitching the culture.

I took the patient route and, once the ferment slowed to almost nothing (about 3 weeks), I racked into a clean carboy and allowed it to settle on its own for 3 more weeks then racked again (off the lees) adding the inhibitor and a Campden tablet and shaking occasionally for a few days to mix the chemicals and release the CO2 (the test dram was a bit acidic). Bottled 25 May, ready next Spring.

Everyone has shit to talk about 2016, and so do I; but, I’ll minimise that, here. I finally sprang for two new pair of running shoes to replace the pair, featured in the photos here, that I picked up in Chattanooga in September 2015 and subsequently added 2253 running miles on before retiring them last weekend (with walking, as these were my usual day-to-day shoes, these had much closer to 4000 miles on them).

Over the Christmas break, we watched a shitload of TV and a bunch of really cheery movies (highly recommended of these are the drama Martha Marcy Mae Marlene and the documentary The Coming War With China. To recover from those you might want to find Twenty Feet From Fame. But, we also caught a bunch of shit tele and some old stuff. In keeping with the theme of the year, we downloaded a collection of the Tonight Show (with Johnny Carson) and spent the entirety of each show playing the middle-age white person version of Jew-Not-A-Jew (aka the straight person’s version of Queer-Not-A-Queer) by pointing at each corpse we spotted on screen and saying, “DEAD.” “Bob Hope. DEAD.” “Joan Rivers! DEAD.” “Gary Shandling, DEAD.” (By the way, that’s Not A Jew, Jew, and a little of both).

So, instead of the multitude of other celebrity deaths everyone is banging on about, here are the 17 I noticed but did not eulogise (and some of whom you may have missed):